God or Goddess help the women of India

Posted by: Fredster on: January 8, 2013

• In: Human Rights | Patriarchy | Womens' Rights
• 12 Comments

I’m sure you have heard about the young woman who was gang raped in India and then after being sent to Singapore for treatment, she died from the assault.

The young woman was gang raped on a bus in New Dehli back in December.  Apparently, she fought back against her attackers as did the young man who was with her.

“She was very strong. She always said one should never bear atrocities but fight against it. While she was admitted in hospital, she told me that she fought back as hard as she could. She was defending herself by beating and biting them.

She thrashed them and kicked them too. They were boiling in anger by her defence so they decided to kill her. She told me that they were murmuring ‘maar do ise’ (kill her). They threw her considering she was dead,” her brother said.

The young woman was apparently very intelligent and was hoping to become a doctor and worked in a call center while also attending college.

Lallji Singh, a man who is reportedly the victim’s uncle told The Hindu newspaper that ”she had made up her mind very early that she wanted to become a doctor.” And as the AFP reports, the woman was reportedly in the midst of planning her wedding: “They had made all the wedding preparations and had planned a wedding party in Delhi” for February, said Meena Rai, a close friend and neighbor.

Her family consisting of two younger brothers and parents who were longing for her well-being is submerged in grief after her death

[snip]

Her father, a daily-wage loader at the IGI airport, struggles to make ends meet. He has worked double shifts, sacrificing sleep at the age of 55 to earn some extra bucks to submit his daughter’s fees studying in a different state.

She worked in a call centre in Dehradun after her college hours earn. She gave her fees for two consecutive years in her college earning from the call centre. She bought us many gifts and things for the household,” said her father.

She used to sleep for four to five hours only. Rest of the time she studied or worked. She was very intelligent. She did her schooling from Janakpuri and topped in her class. She was very stubborn about books no matter how costly those were. I always fulfilled her demands because they were always genuine,” he said.

SHAME ON YOU

So what is the Indian government going to do about cases like this?  They have come up with a brilliant plan to shame the attackers and rapists.

NEW DELHI: The government said on Thursday that it will post the photos, names and addresses of convicted rapists on official websites to publicly shame them, in a new measure to combat growing crime against women.

Minister of state for home affairs Ratanjit Pratap Narain Singh said the campaign would begin first in New Delhi, where the brutal gang-rape of a student on December 16 by six drunken men has sparked nationwide protests.

“We are planning to start it (the campaign) in Delhi,” Singh told reporters, hours after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said women were being treated unfairly in India.

“Photographs, names and addresses of the rapists will be uploaded on the Delhi Police website (http://www.delhipolice.nic.in),” he said.

“We are very serious about dealing with the problem and taking all possible action as early as possible.”

Even in the event that the Indian government does start some type of publicity program where they identify rapists, and “shame” them, it seems there are going to have to be some types of attitudinal changes on the parts of the citizens themselves.  There was another rape incident that involved the death of the victim, but this time it was by suicide.

A 17-year-old Indian girl who was gang-raped committed suicide after police pressured her to drop the case and marry one of her attackers, police and a relative said on Thursday.

Before her death, there had been no arrests over her case although three people were detained on Thursday. Two of them were her alleged male attackers and the third was a suspected woman accomplice.

The victim’s sister told Indian television that the teenager had been urged to either accept a cash settlement or marry one of her attackers.

“The police started pressuring her to either reach a financial settlement with her attackers or marry one of them,” her sister told the NDTV network.  (bolding/italics above are mine)

When you read something like that does it hardly comes as a surprise to read this:

Official figures show that 228,650 of the total 256,329 violent crimes recorded last year in India were against women.

SHADES OF LAW AND ORDER

In what could have been taken from a scene in Law and Order with Jack McCoy and Lennie Briscoe, apparently two of the suspects may have been “flipped” against the other suspects.

Over the weekend, two of the accused filed an application to be “approvers,” which means they could become informers against the other suspects, possibly in an attempt to get a lesser sentence. Given the heated atmosphere around the case, however, the tactic may not do them much good. Prosecutors have repeatedly insisted that they will seek the death penalty and public opinion may not allow them to get away leniency, even in the event of a guilty plea. Also, police say they already have recorded confessions and extensive DNA evidence, which means they may not even need much cooperation from the suspects to get decisive verdicts.

And apparently the rape of the student has caused so much anger that “members of the local bar association have refused to offer representation to the defendants…”

I do hope the bastards get representation by some lawyer because if not, then they are going to have excellent chances of reduced sentences or worse on appeal.

Folks I was totally aghast when this first happened last month.  I had always thought of India as being “civilized”.  India was  colonized by the British, it is a member of the Commonwealth and let’s face it:  they have all of our call centers and tech support centers, that takes some trained people.  I didn’t’ think of it as a country where violent gang rapes would occur and a member of the local police would try to talk a rape victim into taking a cash settlement OR marry one of her assailants.  This kind of stuff has to come to an end.

This is an open thread.

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